WELFARE CHILDREN
SIR,—After listening to Miss Kendon's gentle sermon on the invertebrata of the New Estate, your readers must have been astonished to find, on dispersing, that Mr. Peter Green, like a placard-flaunting evan- gelist, was waiting to assure them that they had been listening to only half the truth, and that much more than flaccidity of home environment is behind it all. It seems that those national figures of fun, the ' angry viewers,' are behind it all, too, as well as the gun-toting private eyes of fiction, and Sammy McCarthy and Jersey Joe Walcott. (But not, of course, Jem Mace or Sam Langford.)
For these diverse objects of Mr. Green's dislike there is a convenient noun of assembly. The noun is ' hobby-horse.'
We are becoming distressingly familiar nowadays with a new form of controversy on social and ethical matters, and having read several letters like Mr. Green's in the past few years I would frankly trade the lot for a couple of good old pre-war choleric colonels. They, at least, plonked their prejudices down in the first line, and it was usually the first line of three and not a hundred.
It is only necessary to study the examples given by Mr. Green to see that the mass of hcavy thinking in which he wraps them up is actually woollier than the home training of Miss Kendon's children. Thus he finds it useful to speak of the vast sales of Micky Spillane. (I have never seen anyone buying one of Mr. Spillane's books, and I doubt whether Mr. Green has, either, but let us assume that the author's sales are at least half of what is claimed for them.) It is less useful, though—for Mr. Green's pur- poses—to mention the vast sales of raft- floating or mountain-climbing literature, because that might suggest a love of adven- ture or an admiration of courage.
The next gem is the blood-lust of the packed boxing stadium.' I can assure Mr. Green that there are no stadiums anywhere near the typical New Estate, and that in numerous large towns in Britain boxing has never been seen outside the youth club or the Baths hall. If the promoters of even a world-title fight could expect a gate as big as what Arsenal get every week they would start sleeping again.
The sadistic films,' Mr. Green goes on, ' that draw Saturday night queues.' There have been Saturday night queues for every film released in this country since motion pictures were invented. The shootings and beatings-up which occur in the very few modern gangster films are mere backslaps Compared with what we saw in Scar/ace and Little Caesar. (Which, incidentally, pro- duced no cosh-boys, and no experts with the bicycle chain, in any of our great cities.) 'Social mass-hypnotism' has arrived, as J. B. Priestley pointed out long ago, but the way Mr. Green sets about illustrating it .is not likely to make him a valuable ally in any counter-attack.—Yours faithfully,
London, N.W.6 FRANK LITTLER
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